Manolín, The Doctor of Salsa, harshly criticized Mariela Castro in an interview with Tania Costa for CiberCuba, where he highlighted the central contradiction of the Cuban regime: promoting sexual diversity while absolutely repressing freedom of thought.
"It's crazy. I think there's even some mental delay involved," said the singer, before launching into the phrase that summarizes his argument: Fidel and Raúl, through Mariela, "acknowledge sexual diversity. That is, their freedom from the waist down."
Manolín left no room for ambiguity: "How can one conclude that sexuality is diverse but not that thought is diverse? How can one arrive at such a conclusion? Because they are shameless. Because they do what suits them."
The singer repeated the same expression three times to characterize that contradiction: "What shamelessness! What shamelessness! What shamelessness!"
Manolín made it clear that, in his view, Mariela does not act independently: "The Castros are the ones who decide everything we do." Raúl Castro's daughter has directed the National Center for Sexual Education since 2000 and has been the public figure behind advancements such as the Family Code, which was approved in a referendum in September 2022 with 66.87% of the votes.
However, these advancements have been widely questioned as contradictory. In May 2019, CENESEX itself canceled the official Conga against Homophobia and an independent alternative march was repressed by plainclothes agents with forced detentions.
For Manolín, contradiction is not a logical error but a calculated decision: the regime allows what is convenient for it and suppresses what threatens it.
The singer expanded his criticism to the geopolitical level, accusing the regime of having "dynamited all of Latin America," harboring guerrillas and fugitives wanted by the United States, and aligning with China and Russia. "You are in my backyard and you are lending yourself to set up a platform for them to catch me. These people are crazy," he stated.
Manolín compared the situation to the Russian invasion of Ukraine: just as Putin did not tolerate Ukraine's closer ties with the European Union, the United States would have similar reasons not to allow Cuba to serve as a base for its adversaries. "They haven't wiped us out by miracle. We haven't been erased from the face of the earth purely by miracle because the dictatorship has been serving us on a silver platter. It has been serving us on a silver platter for years," he stated.
The singer also emphasized that the Cuban people have always been left out of the decisions made by those in power: "All the decisions that have been made in Cuba—political, social, and economic—in the last 70 years have been made by the Cuban government without our input. We are the ones who pay the price."
This interview takes place weeks after Manolín intensified his public criticisms of the regime. In April, and urged the people to "not save their executioners," and days earlier he had warned that in response to a call from Díaz-Canel.
"The blackouts, the misery, the hunger, the scarcity of everything, we bear the burden of that. They make the decisions because they have everything," concluded Manolín, summarizing in one sentence the logic that, in his view, defines 70 years of dictatorship in Cuba.
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